


Wound Licking

by Kittywitch



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Crazy!Doctor, Gen, Implied Battery, Off-Screen Battery, manic moments of no consequence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-08
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-14 07:11:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/834142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittywitch/pseuds/Kittywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a hard day of world-saving, the sixth Doctor and Peri patch each other up. The Doctor finds more wounds than he expected. No wounds are actually licked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wound Licking

    The day was saved. The villain thwarted, the monster slain, the hapless youth had won the fair maiden's heart,  (or she his, that part was never clear) and the mysterious stranger had rode off into the sunset with his lovely assistant. Sunsets were easier to ride into aboard a ship that hopped to the other side of the sun, shifting out of sight like a mirage. And now that they were well out of sight of the quite rightly impressed public they had saved, both stranger and assistant were more vocal about that particular bout of day-saving.  
  
    "Ow ow ow _STOP_!" Peri screeched, pushing the Doctor away. He tumbled back and needed to drop the damp cotton he was holding to keep from tumbling off the bed entirely. The both of them were sitting cross-legged on the white bed in the room Peri called her own. A rather eclectic first aid kit was spread out between them, looking to be comprised of whatever little medical gadgets met with the Doctor's approval over his travels: a bottle of iodine, Band-Aids with pictures of sushi on them, a pair of large and slightly terrifying shears, a small square device with lots of buttons on it, cough syrup, white bandaging with colored stripes of medication woven into the fabric, packets of plant matter and other small objects Peri could only assume belonged in a first aid kit from the context all spread out around the comforter haphazardly.  
    "Hold still, will you?!" he exclaimed. The Doctor frowned and reached out for her arm again. She allowed the scrapes to be daubed despite the fact the iodine stung.  
    "You _aren't_ a doctor of medicine, are you?" Peri asked suspiciously.  
    "I'm a doctor of 'right here with a medical kit' , and that's the kind you need at the moment." he said shortly, not looking up from her arm. The Doctor was in his shirtsleeves, forearms scrubbed with very cold water that left his hands still uncomfortably cool. The lack of his signature coat didn't make him look any less colorful, as an orange-green bruise the size of a grapefruit was forming on each of his elbows. This last detail might have been accented by the violet Band-Aid under his eye, but he looked exceptionally cross.  
    "Your left leg and right arm are rather badly lacerated. Perhaps we should have stayed around long enough for a specialist to have a look at you."  
    "And get two kinds of tetanus not even known to humanity?" Peri grumbled. "No thank you, that civilization looked barely out of the dark ages."  
    The Doctor scoffed wordlessly at this, and Peri sighed in frustration. The scrapes had gone fairly high up her leg, and Peri's suspicion that the Doctor would insist on dressing them himself, regardless of the fact this would involve handling her inner thigh, was fast becoming a conclusion. She wasn't quite sure if the word she was looking for was "trepidation" or "anticipation", largely because she wasn't entirely sure which one she was feeling.  
    "This is your fault for falling down the damned quarry in the first place, you know." he grumbled.  
    "Well- ow! -you were at the bottom of it. I didn't- ouch!- mean to fall down, I was running and I just- ow! You're doing this on purpose! -sort of slipped."  
    "Slipped?" the Doctor spat, looking up from her arm. "Slipped?! _Slipped?!_ You tumbled down a story and a half of jagged rocks, I half-expected you to be dead by the time you reached me!"  
    "No thanks to you!" she snapped. "You _could_ have tried to catch me, you know."  
     The Doctor frowned and rolled up her sleeve a bit more. The more he was seeing of her wounds, the more he thought he should have gone with his first instinct and had Peri remove her shirt entirely. However, somehow he suspected she just might object to that. He pulled the fabric up another inch, and found an injury he wasn't expecting.  
    "Peri..." he asked curiously, exposing as much of her shoulder as he could manage, "Peri, what is this?" She looked at her shoulder as best as she was able.  
    "It's nothing, Doctor." said said quickly. "That happened a long time ago, an automatic door opened onto me."  
    "A long time ago?" he repeated skeptically. "That bruise can't be a week old, two at the very outside."  
    "You said that things don't spoil in the Tardis, and usually weapons don't work inside it. Maybe that temporal field is effecting the way my bruise is healing."  
    "It doesn't work that way." he said. "What's more, I don't think you could have done that to yourself."  
    "Well-- well maybe the Tardis hit some turbulence and I landed badly."  
    "You're changing your story, Peri."  
The human pursed her lips and looked away. For a long moment, Peri watched an empty corner of the room, the Doctor watched Peri, and neither of them spoke.  
    "You told me that my episodes had stopped." he said quietly.  
    "I never said that, I just said they--" she floundered for a moment. "Got less frequent."  
    "Yes! Less frequent and less violent, tapering off to practically nothing!" he exclaimed. "You talked about me getting lost inside the Tardis, and suddenly speaking in verse, and breaking small objects; you never said that I hurt you!"  
    "You didn't mean to!" she insisted. "You just started to have a fit, and I was trying to calm you down, but you pushed me away and I fell. That's it. It could have just as easily been turbulence!"  
    " _Turbulence?!_ " he shouted. "Yes, turbulence of the mind that should not be left unaddressed! How many of these fits have you neglected to inform me of?"  
    "And what could you have done if you knew it was happening?" she asked firmly. "All you ever do is get overdramatic and repentant and I don't see how that helps anything. Anyway, I know you didn't mean it."  
    "My intention is immaterial, particularly if it results in your injury." he spat, climbing off the bed. She turned in place and grabbed at his wrist to keep him from running away.  
    "You don't understand, you can't even remember what happened. You looked like you were having a seizure or something, it was my fault for trying to keep you from thrashing around like that."  
    "I _will_ take responsibility for my own actions, thank you."  
    "Doctor, this is me." Peri insisted, straightening in her seat. "I don't let you get away with the most _minor_ mistakes, if this had really been a problem-"  
    "It _is_ a problem! You were hurt!"  
    "Do you think I wouldn't mention something if it was anything serious?"  
    "At the moment I have no idea what delusion you're capable of!" he snapped, whirling around. He wanted to just walk away from this sad, confusing situation, close the door and leave the girl and her problems shut away until he was ready to deal with them. He also wanted to throw himself on her mercy and beg for forgiveness, but there was only so much his pride would allow. Somehow through the conflicting emotions, his desire to see his friend was safe and the pride of not leaving a job half-done won out. He decided to sit back down and finish patching Peri up.  
The part of him who was still rather attached to the "beg for forgiveness" plan was also agreeable to this.  
    The Doctor sighed and took his seat at the end of the bed again, dragging her foot into his lap in a way that for all the world resembled a schoolgirl about to paint her friend's toenails.  
    "What are you doing?" Peri asked.  
    "Penance." he said shortly. She let out a soft half-laugh.  
    "That's what you said last time, too."

**Author's Note:**

> As I learned more about fanfiction tropes, I was annoyed that "ministration" did not mean what I thought it did. This is what I thought it meant. This story was originally posted to my tumblr.


End file.
